How to Store and Manage Build Artifacts Using Nexus Repository Manager

Gita Cliff — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:52:34 +0000

In modern software development, building an application is only part of the journey — managing and storing the build artifacts is just as important. As teams adopt CI/CD practices, they need a reliable way to store, version, and distribute packages such as JAR files, Docker images, or npm modules. This is where Nexus Repository Manager comes in. In this step-by-step guide, we will explore how to publish build artifacts to Nexus, understand why artifact repositories are critical in DevOps workflows, and see how they improve reliability, security, and efficiency in a CI/CD pipeline.

Install a run Nexus on a cloud server: In this walk through guide we are going to create a droplet on digitalocean, create and upload your public SSH key, configure the droplet firewall

After creating the cloud server we ssh into the cloud server as a root user with ssh root@<server public ip> which connects you securely

Since we are going to use maven2 built artifacts, we install java 17 on the cloud server with sudo apt update and sudo apt install openjdk-17-jre-headless, then confirm java has been succesfully installed with java -version as seen below

Download and Install Nexus

Navigate to /opt: ensures you download and extract files in the right system directory for software

cd /opt

Download Nexus archive:

wget https://download.sonatype.com/nexus/3/nexus-unix-x86-64-3.79.0-09.tar.gz which Downloads the Nexus Repository Manager tarball from Sonatype's official URL to the current directory

List and extract:

ls -lh tar -xvzf nexus-unix-x86-64-3.79.0-09.tar.gz

Create a nexus user with sudo privileges (if not already present) for security best practices with sudo adduser nexus
Change ownership of Nexus directory with chown -R nexus:nexus nexus-3.79.0-09/ which ensures the Nexus app can access and modify its installation files when running as "nexus"
- Change ownership of Nexus data directory with chown -R nexus:nexus sonatype-work/ which ensures the Nexus app can access and modify its installation files when running as "nexus"

Create a hosted maven snapshots repository in the nexus UI, with the respective user having a role with the necessary privileges to publish artifacts to the repository

Once this is done then we configure our maven project to publish build artifacts to the nexus hosted repo we created above with the right credentials;

Add the maven-deploy-plugin configuration the pom.xml file of the java maven project

Configure Credentials in settings.xml file with vim ~/.m2/settings.xml to ensures Maven can authenticate to the Nexus repository during deploy phase and <id> must match the one specified in the POM’s distributionManagement

Now its time to build and deploy the jar file to our nexus repository by simple doing mvn package and then mvn deploy to publish the packaged jar file to nexus repository

You can then check in the nexus UI under the Browser section

Lastly we can make use of the nexus rest api to interact with repository and download artifacts from our remote server ie

Execute curl -u {user}:{password} -X GET 'http://{nexus-ip}:8081/service/rest/v1/components?repository={repo-name}&sort=version' on the DigitalOcean droplet.

Execute wget followed by the result of the previous command , followed by java -jar java-app-1.0.jar & to start the application the background

Deploy and run application on a cloud server

Gita Cliff — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:03:47 +0000

So for this one am going to be using DigitalOcean cloud provider , create a droplet with the basic storage capacity.
Add you public ssh key to digitalOcean to authenticate yourself with the server when you connect to it for root user
For the steps to create a server on digitalocean you read about them here and then Configure the firewall to open ssh port 22 (because by default the ssh service listens on port 22) for your ip to ensure ssh secure connection, why: We ideally don't want anyone an authorized to ssh into our server for security best practice
After creating your droplet on digitalocean, head off to your local terminal and ensure you do have your public ssh key in your at /home/youruser/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ,if you don't have it there then you can create one with ssh-keygen -t rsa

Then ssh into the remote server as a root user for now ie ssh root@<remote-server-ip>
Once in the linux terminal install java 17 ie sudo apt update && sudo apt install openjdk-17-jdk -y
using the linux apt package manager and then create a linux user ie with the adduser command to avoid running java application as a root user for security best practices.
You can also grand that user privileges to perform administrative tasks with usermod -aG sudo cliff and also create an .ssh
folder with the authorized_keys file in the user's home directory of your linux user. Add in the users ssh public to authenticate them with the remote server

Now we copy the built, compiled jar file from our build tool ie maven or gradle on our local machine with scp build/libs/java-react-example.jar root@<remote-ip>:/root to the remote server on the cloud.
Then switch to user we created using su - cliff and run java -jar java-react-example.jar , this starts the Java application contained in the jar file which will be listening at a particular port when you run ps aux | grep java to inspect the process . This port needs to be opened in the firewall configuration rule to all sources

Forem: Gita Cliff

How to Store and Manage Build Artifacts Using Nexus Repository Manager

Deploy and run application on a cloud server